Conclusion: The ‘Bios’ and ‘Geo’ of Contemporary Development-Security Policy

Abstract

The chapters in this volume problematised and examined various dimensions of the current juncture of international aid. The first part approached the Western and mainstream paradigm by interrogating and challenging the very foundations of development as a project, by investigating it in terms of a historical and contemporary practice within liberal governance and by questioning core foundations as well as recent trends such as the turn to neoliberalism, the emergence of sustainable development and the accompanying focus on civil society and NGOs. Further, it explored the connection between development and security issues and their reframing into a development-security nexus. In this context a crucial theoretical insight and ‘lens’ was the biopolitics of development — a politics over life through development — and the shift from a focus on building nation states in former colonies and promoting modernisation and global material convergence towards a focus on populations and life. Rich language and terminology reflect this shift where development takes life rather than states as its referent: we thus have the language of ‘state fragility’, ‘human security’, ‘human development’, ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘civil society’. This language, and thus policy shift, has been crucial in re-extending the Western sovereign frontier in the periphery, that is, in penetrating aid-receiving societies.